Inspired By a Master

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you are probably familiar with my Big Three - Leonardo Drew, El Anatsui and Lee Bontecou. Other masters, such as Joan Mitchell, Philip Guston and Richard Diebenkorn,  also inspire me, but the Big Three appeal more to my somewhat dark and grim natural aesthetic. Above all, materiality or physicality is what resonates with me.

So, as I think any artist must, I ask myself from time to time how much I should be influenced by my inspirations. Should I try to copy their work? How much of them should rub off on my own work? Is there a point where my work becomes more about what they want to say than what I do?

Thinking L.D., 2012, found and invented materials with tacks and encaustic
on two panels, 48"H x 60"W (click to enlarge)

Here is the first piece I've made that somewhat deliberately (in my mind at least) refers to work by one of my Big Three - Leonardo Drew. If I didn't tell you that, would you have guessed? (Of course that's provided you are familiar with his work.) What I was thinking of was his work with boxes put together into a grid, such as his No. 43 of 1994, image below:

Photo of Leonardo Drew's No. 43 taken from "Existed"
(For more about Leonardo Drew, see this blog link to his show
at the DeCordova Museum.)

Now, you can see that my piece looks nothing like his, really, but thinking about his piece is what got me going. His piece has 3-dimensional boxes with rags, found objects and all kinds of stuff in them. My "boxes" are just strips of painted cardboard that frame strips tacked inside them. And my piece is ever so neat, compared to his.

A detail from Thinking L.D.

The Creative Process - Try and Try Again
Just to let you in on how the creative process went for me, I first started with "boxes" the same size throughout the panels, made just with strips of natural cardboard painted with clear encaustic. I used them to frame strips of other materials that I tacked down as usual. I ended up with something that looked like a cardboard bookcase. So I scrubbed that.

Another detail from Thinking L.D.

The second version enlarged some of the "boxes" but continued them throughout the length of the panels. I thought it still looked like too much cardboard. Then I removed rows of the "boxes" at top and bottom of the panels and put in painted strips that extend the width of each panel. I liked that because they broke up the "box" look, and it turned out that these strips were what really interested me. (After coloring in the cardboard "boxes" with oilstick, I was happier with the overall piece.)

An Unexpected Bonus - A New Direction?

Half 'n' Half, 2012, found and invented materials with encaustic and tacks, 32"H x 40.5"W

In fact I liked those painted strips so much that I decided I should make another piece using the leftovers (plus a few more). I put them on a panel and then added that to a panel I had already made in Running Stitch mode. After tweaking the R.S. panel a bit to make the two halves come together more, I was happy. (The bottom panel is one I had made myself so its measurements are a bit off from the standard. However, it turns out that I like the little bit of difference in width between the top half and the bottom half. It gives it sort of an architectural look)

Detail of painted strips from Half 'n' Half

A Moral
Don't we expect a moral from any story - or at least a good ending? Well, the moral is that whatever pings your aesthetic brain cells and gets a piece started is a good thing, but being able to see what you've got and where you're going with it is a learned response, I think. And, who knows, a move made out of desperation may be that unexpected path that takes you to artistic nirvana - or not. You'll just have to try it and see.

It's All About the Paint, Isn't It?

Physical Geography, the show that Lynette and I have up at ArtSpace Maynard is nearly over. It runs next Wednesday through Friday and then we take it down on Saturday, 2/28. Both of us are pretty damned sick of the whole thing. We have had to be there the last 5 Saturdays in a row and next week will make 6 (although I bailed one Saturday and Lynette gallery sat by herself.) It is feeling more like work than pleasure because it's taking time away from being in the studio.

So now I'm thinking about the whole process of making art and all it entails: photographing, cataloging, proposing exhibits, hanging it, exhibiting it, marketing it, wrapping it, shipping it, etc. and how much it becomes about the physicality of the product, like moving iron instead of joyously expressing some component of your inner being. (A little sarcasm there, but you get the point.)

Our pal Sue Katz, fellow New England Wax member, came to our talk on Saturday and asked Lynette about the meaning of her work and/or her inspiration. Sue loves to talk about this subject and we have had many conversations about it. (She is also giving a participatory talk about it at the encaustic conference in June.)

Lynette Haggard: "Circa 013", 2008, encaustic on panel

Lynette was a little nonplussed because she had already spoken about some of the work in the show being inspired by trips to Europe and Cuba where she saw ancient (or at least old) walls that had been scarred by time and use into a patina of old paint, wallpaper, dirt and marks representing layers of human life. Beyond that, she wasn't ready to dig too deeply into her motivation or meaning since she thought her work was more about the process of making the thing itself than expressing some inner belief or need.


Nancy Natale: "Red Pearl", 2008, encaustic and mixed media on panel (alias the Nipple Piece)

Someone once asked me what a particular piece was about and I said, "Paint." When I make a painting, it is what it is, not what it represents. I am all about process and object making. However, as the process of making a piece evolves, it may suggest things to me; perhaps it reminds me of an old wall or a textile or an undersea world, but that's not what it's about - I am not trying to create that thing.Usually when you have to confront this subject of meaning in your work, it's because you have to write that dreaded (or dreadful) artist's statement. Some of that stuff is such high-falutin' blather that you could never understand any of it, and the less said, the more words it takes to say it in. Yet people (especially curators) love to read this stuff (which is a little silly because if they really get into your work and study it, they make up their own meaning anyway).

These days, when I write a statement, I usually say my work is about gardening: the structure in the painting representing the man-made elements in a garden (hardscape) with the paint and/or plant inclusions representing the organic components (planting). But often it is described as "quilt-like," which I guess it is, although this is not on my mind when I make it and doesn't occur to me afterwards. (A recent art writer said it was "a Willy Wonka take on Mondrian.")

So these are the two meanings I'm thinking about today: the meaning of making art (as in, what's it all about, Alfie?) and the meaning of art being made (as in, what the hell's that thing?).

Inspiration for Painting - Philip Guston

Yesterday I was thinking about writing a piece on Philip Guston. It was a gloomy, stormy day and I felt kind of melancholy and annoyed, really too cranky to write. In the afternoon, as I went to the door to let the dogs out, I saw a red-tailed hawk in the yard standing over a kill and eating warily. When I opened the door, the hawk flew off with the corpse in one talon. I went over to look at the spot where he had been eating. In the center of the area, surrounded by a ring of feathers (a mourning dove I think), were pieces of viscera - intestines, a foot, pieces of flesh. They were the same dingy pinkish-red color that Guston used a lot.

It's funny the way artists develop a personal pallette - it's just those certain colors that have more meaning than others. Mine has orange, blue, green, white and - the favorite - black. Guston developed his pallette early in his painting career and it never changed even though his painting style went through contortions: white, black and what looks like cadmium red medium plus a weird green and a blue. That pallette identifies Guston nearly as much as the forms he painted over and over in the latter part of his career.

A friend asked why I liked Guston and I told her that the paint handling was what attracted me so much - I liked the luscious surface and the way you could see that he changed his mind in a painting and painted over an area so that it looked like an obvious change, not like it had always been the way it ended up. I admire that because that obvious over-painting gives me a little inkling into the process of construction and lets me see the painter's struggle.

I have a quotation from Guston pinned up on my wall in the studio: "Frustration is one of the great things in art; satisfaction is nothing." I'm not sure I agree that satisfaction is nothing, but lord knows there's plenty of frustration in making art. Is it the overcoming of frustration or the frustration itself that keeps us making?

I think I have three or four books on Guston that I used to spend a lot of time studying. The main one is the hardcover Philip Guston Retrospective, organized by Michael Auping. Another very intimate look at Guston is Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston by his daughter Musa Mayer, which is also about her own life as well as his. The Retrospective has lots of reproductions of works from throughout Guston's career. (There is also a paperback version, but I'm not sure if it's as extensive.)

Looking closely at the works in the Retrospective one afternoon, I began crying because I empathized so strongly with the sadness and despair Guston expressed in those late paintings that are referred to so often as "cartoons." The depth of feeling he painted is intense and the loneliness of his battle against depression, alcoholism, injustice and futility hit me. What a weight he took on! The forms he painted repetitively such as shoes and boots, spindly legs, the huge head with one eye, the bottle, the hooded figures, the bare lightbulb, the pointing finger, the cigarettes, the books, the clock - all became so weighted with meaning, both universal and autobiographical.

Guston, born Phillip (with two l's) Goldstein in Montreal in 1913, had two very traumatic events in his childhood and youth. Most shockingly, at about age 10 he found his father's body hanged in suicide. (His father had been a blacksmith in the old country of Russia and was forced to make a living as a junkman when the family moved to California.) Secondly, when Guston was about 17, his older brother Nat had his legs crushed when his own car rolled down a slope, pinning him. Within a short time he died of gangrene in the hospital.

As a boy and young teen, Guston began drawing and hid himself away in a large closet with a bare lightbulb where he practiced cartoons. He dropped out of high school and had a very limited art education, but he became a talented muralist, who worked for the WPA during the depression and later taught at the University of Iowa. Beginning in the 1950s, Guston began painting abstractly and became a member of the New York Abstract Expressionists.

"To BWT", 1952, 48" x 51", oil on canvas

In the 1950s and '60s Guston made beautiful, abstract paintings that were very successful and extolled by Clement Greenberg and the AbExers.

"Zone", 1954, 46" x 46", oil on canvas

Guston's work began changing as he explored abstraction. Dark shapes started appearing on the canvas but he painted out recognizable images because an image "excludes too much." The paintings he made in the 1960s were called the "dark paintings" and were not well received by critics because they seemed to exist outside the accepted definition of abstraction.

"Close-Up III", 1961, 70" x 72", oil on canvas

By the late 1960s when the Vietnam War was in full swing, Guston was mobilized by the atmosphere of protestors, riots and the election of Nixon in 1968. What he referred to as "the final mask" came down and he began painting recognizable forms - especially hooded figures that looked like Ku Klux Klansmen. (I should say that Guston didn't regard the KKK in an admiring way but said that he was fascinated by evil and wanted to show the KKK carrying on their normal activities - more as ironic models of political actors. These hooded figures actually had been an early theme in his painting in the 1940s.) Rebelling against the prevalent belief of the absolute purity of non-objective form, Guston said, "I got sick and tired of all that purity … I wanted to tell stories!"

In his 1970 show at the Marlborough Gallery in New York, Guston revealed the full extent of his defiance of orthodox Abstract Expressionism when he showed paintings such as "Bad Habits." He was excoriated for leaving the fold of abstraction in much the same way that Bob Dylan was criticized ad nauseum for going electric in 1965 at the Newport Folk Festival.

"Bad Habits", 1970, 73"x78", oil on canvas.

Guston continued painting in his own style for the rest of his life, developing the portfolio of forms that meant so much to him.*

"Painting, Smoking, Eating," 1973, 77 1/2" x 103 1/2", oil on canvas

This work is so much about painting to me. I read it as the painter obsessively seeing his work (all those shoes) in his mind even though the actual painting is not in front of him.

"Head and Bottle," 1975, 65 1/2" x 68 1/2"

Can any image express alcoholic dependency more vividly? (This painting sold in May 2007 for $6.5 million. Drink up!)

"Talking," 1979, 78" x 68", oil on canvas

*Guston was pretty well known in Boston since he taught at Boston University for five years in the '70s and developed a following among his students. His painting "Talking" seems to me that he is gesturing and talking about painting - never out of his thoughts.

Guston died at age 67 in 1980, just three weeks after the opening of the retrospective organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Inspiration for Painting - Joan Mitchell

How come when I was in art school in the late '80s no one mentioned the name Joan Mitchell? Gender bias - yes, I know. But I remember taking a course in women artists offered in the meager Women's Studies Department at MassArt, and most of the women we studied had been dead for eons and were either great mistresses or impressionists, neither of which appealed to me particularly. I do recall that Faith Ringold was mentioned in passing, along with Judy Chicago and some other feminist artists, but I don't remember reading about what I would call real painters or seeing their work. I'm talking people (women) who really enjoyed pushing paint around like Joan Snyder, for example, or, since she is my subject - Joan Mitchell.

It's a long time ago and I'm probably forgetting any mention of her when I was in school, but somehow within the past eight years, since I've been living in western Mass., I discovered the work of Joan Mitchell - no thanks to any academics - and became very enthusiastic about it, although without having any desire to paint the way she did. That's probably because I knew I would fail, mostly because her work has a fierce emotional content that I would be incapable of bringing to a painting.

Hudson River Day Line, 1955

I have two large books on her work: The Paintings of Joan Mitchell by Jane Livingston (catalog of a retrospective Livingston organized at the Whitney in 2002) and Joan Mitchell * by Klaus Kertess, a longtime friend, gallerist and drinking buddy of Mitchell's. At one time in my old studio in Ashfield, I very much enjoyed paging through these books and wondering how Mitchell had continually composed such intricate paintings over such a long period of time. Her use of color and variety of marks motivated me to pick up the brush and make a painting when I felt overcome by a blank canvas and totally isolated in the wilds of the hilltowns.

Cheim Some Bells, 1964

I came across a review of the Whitney retrospective by Brenda Richardson that was published in ArtForum in September 2002, and I quote her observations about Mitchell's paintings:

"Mitchell hews to a distinctive palette and personal vocabulary of marks from beginning to end. Green, blue, orange, black, and white are favored colors. Her marks include (1) choppy vertical smears, rather like a color test, usually in pairs, (2) thin "washes" of pastel hues (lime, flesh, rose, slate blue), (3) daubs of impasto, almost always on top of other paint, (4) slashing strokes, long and stiff, vaguely scimitar-like, (5) eroding or "melting" once-geometric rectangles, mounds, or blobs, and (6) drips. Nearly all her paintings use nearly all her colors and all her marks in some combination; the paintings are almost always allover matte in finish (glazed bits appear only occasionally). A painting like Low Water, 1969, is absolutely classic Mitchell, combining all of the above in hieratic descent."

Barge-Peniche, 1975

Mitchell was apparently a "difficult" person (real pain in the ass) who drank way too much, had a long-term love/hate relationship with another painter (Jean-PierreRiopelle), loved dogs, spent most of her adult life in a house on the Seine 30 miles from Paris and made large-scale, many times multi-canvas, paintings continuously for 40 years or so. She was reasonably successful although nowhere near what she would have been if she had only had that other appendage.

After April, Bernie, 1987

Through all the misery and frustrations of her relationships with friends and lovers plus the numerous deaths of friends, relatives and dogs that she suffered and along with her severe health problems and active alcoholism, she kept painting - sometimes raging away at the canvas or expressing less violent emotions that she was unable to release any other way. Her tenacity and commitment to her work despite all this were remarkable, as was her refusal to make paintings in a more manageable size. She must have had a tremendous physical struggle that included having to get a studio assistant to squeeze paint from tubes due to the arthritis in her hands (per Kertess).

She had several cancers at the end of her life, eventually dying of lung cancer in 1992 at age 66. Although suffering excruciating pain, she continued to paint large works until very near her death.

Yves, 1991 (110 1/4" H x 78 3/4"W - that's 12 feet high x 6.5 feet wide)

I have included images of Mitchell's paintings from five decades showing the variety of styles in which she painted. Not included are any of the 21 Grande Vallee' paintings, a series painted over 13 months beginning after the death of her sister in 1982. Painting was an act that allowed Mitchell to transcend death. She said, "Painting is the opposite of death, it permits one to survive, it also permits one to live." (Livingston, p 63)

* Amazon.com lists the Kertess book as only available used from other sellers and starting at $275! I know I didn't pay that shocking price, but it is a great book. Maybe it's available at your art school library - it should be.

Inspiration for Painting - Diebenkorn

A friend asked me what I do when I go to the studio and want to stir up my creative juices. My process is probably similar to that of any other artist - I look at my notebooks, my clippings and at art that I like made by someone else, either in magazines or in my collection of books on art.

While I appreciate work by contemporary artists such as Thomas Nozkowski, Mary Heilmann and Sean Scully, for example, there are three artists from the past whose work continually offers me insight and inspiration. They are Richard Diebenkorn, Joan Mitchell and Philip Guston. That might sound like an odd trio and their inspiration is not notably present in my work, but I admire all of them - for different reasons. What they all share, for me, is their inventive paint application and surfaces and their use of color. I'm going to write a post about each one

Diebenkorn's career inspires me because it took a few twists, but through it all, he kept working - very hard - and exploring, thinking about what he was doing and where he was going with his work. He seems like such a quiet, thoughtful guy who really took his work seriously and sustained his career over a long period of time.

I have two large books of his works: "The Art of Richard Diebenkorn" by Jane Livingston and "Richard Diebenkorn" by Gerald Nordland. (I also have "Richard Diebenkorn in New Mexico" by Gerald Nordland, but that contains very little work not already in the earlier book.)

I was at first drawn to his early abstractions from New Mexico and Berkeley. (This one is Berkeley #8 from 1954.) Diebenkorn began getting his Masters at the University of New Mexico in 1950 and lived in Albuquerque for two and a half years. The abstract paintings that he made early on were very intricate - lots of color, shapes, lines and planes. They were mostly painted in warm colors - ochre, pink, orange, brown. When he returned to Berkeley in 1953, Diebenkorn continued to paint abstractions for a couple of years until beginning to work representationally with landscapes, figure studies and still lifes. His composition and paint handling in these works are very beautiful and they are made with an abstract sensibility.

In 1966 he began teaching at UCLA and moved to Santa Monica, to a neighborhood called Ocean Park, where he made the transition again to abstraction. Some of the landscapes he at first painted there were strikingly like the later abstract works in the Ocean Park Series. That series consists of 140 numbered paintings that he worked on for the next nearly 20 years. Richard Diebenkorn died in 1993.

Many works in the Ocean Park series are composed in blues and greens that critics thought represented the foggy atmosphere of the Bay Area. This one is Ocean Park #54 from 1972.

This is Ocean Park #92 of 1976.

And this is the final painting in the series, Ocean Park #140 of 1985.

It took me a while to appreciate the Ocean Park series. I thought at first that they were too plain, too monochromatic and had too few marks and shapes. After looking at them over time, I gradually came to see that they were very subtle and intricate in their own way. The drawn lines, crudely painted-over areas, pentimenti and smudges were perhaps the most important parts of the paintings. Also the very bottoms of many canvases contained areas that gave a whole context to the huge expanses above. These are works that I find soothing and stimulating at the same time because they represent a quietly exciting way of painting that bears evidence of the artist's mental processes. They are not paintings that just happened, although they do show experimentation and discovery. I look at them and think that making paintings does not come easily but the effort is very worth it.